CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN, dressed in shorts, a faded navy T-shirt and a pair of well-worn yellow Havaianas, his straw fedora askew, is stretched out on an overstuffed banquette overlooking a rice paddy on Portugal’s Alentejo coast. The Paris-based shoe designer arrived here two weeks ago to sketch his next collection, something he does every season in seclusion. His compound of low-slung whitewashed bungalows is set off a dirt road outside of Melides, a beach village just south of the resort town of Comporta, which Louboutin used to frequent before it became a popular destination. "I received invitations to parties from people I didn’t even know," he says with a laugh. "Like I’m going to go to a party at your place when we haven’t even met? The thing is, on holiday I really don’t like to do too much." Why would he? The sun is shining, and the ocean is just visible over the low, green hilltops as Louboutin’s teenage godson sprawls like an overgrown puppy on a living room sofa upholstered in a psychedelic Josef Frank print. Louboutin’s curly-haired daughters, fraternal twins, now nearly 2 years old, toddle around happily.
"I’ve never had business goals," says Louboutin, 53. "I don’t understand how people do that." And yet here he is, with sales that have grown by double digits every year for the past two decades; today there are about 400 points of sale worldwide, as well as 131 stand-alone Christian Louboutin boutiques, with plans to add 12 next year. Celebrities can’t get enough of his shoes, with glossy red soles that are as loud as their often wildly embellished uppers. Jennifer Lopez was an early, devoted fan. So were Madonna, Beyoncé and Kate Moss. This fall, the designer—whose opening salvo from Christian Louboutin Beauté was nail polish in 2013, followed by lipstick in 2014—ventures into the perfume market with three scents bearing the torrid names Trouble in Heaven, Tornade Blonde and Bikini Questa Sera.
Louboutin has a confessed madness for acquiring property. He’s part owner of a château in the Vendée region of France that he shares with his longtime CEO, Bruno Chambelland. He also has a country house near Luxor in Egypt (along with a dahabeah to cruise the Nile), a place in Los Angeles, an apartment in Lisbon and one in Paris, which is his primary home. This compound in Melides is his latest real estate project, though it started as a happy accident about six years ago while he was renting a house in Comporta. He was drawing when a deep paper cut—occupational hazard—sent him to the local hospital for a few stitches. "On the way back I popped by the road here and I thought, That looks nice, let’s have a look." He discovered a small cottage on the other side of a rice paddy, and as soon as it became available to buy, he acquired it and transformed it into an atelier. Three other whitewashed structures have since been built on the 148-acre plot. All share a similarly low-slung, airy style and encompass guest rooms, his own bedroom, a kitchen and a living room.
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With the help of his former partner, celebrated landscape designer Louis Benech (Louboutin is currently single), the property’s landscaping was designed to be colorful but natural. Bougainvillea and trailing grapevines lead the way to the house from the road. By the main residence there is a vegetable patch, with tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, potatoes and herbs; fig, plum and pomegranate trees; and onion plants gone to flower, their tall stalks topped with tiny blossoms spread out into lacy parasols. Like most of his vacation homes, it also has a sizable space set aside to store the treasures he amasses on the road. This one is filled with glossy Mexican pottery, Senegalese rugs, benches designed by William Kent for Houghton Hall, children’s furniture and surfboards. "Yes, I surf—badly," he says. A shopping completist, Louboutin is known to buy multiples whenever possible. "Two weeks ago I went to see this monastery outside of Sofia, Bulgaria, and I found, in the middle of nowhere, a tent displaying pottery. It was beautiful, fully colored inside. I started buying and thought, OK, maybe I will have to buy an extra suitcase. And then the guy I had traveled there to see said, ‘I know someone with a little truck who travels around Europe.’ I told him, ‘You don’t even understand what you just said.’ I took the entire two tents’ worth. Having a store myself, it’s one of my missions to be the customer I would like: the person who is excited, happy and takes everything."
Despite all the finery, Louboutin is not precious, nor does he work with a decorator. His common areas are lived-in—the large desk in his atelier is flanked by baby furniture. In the living room, a taxidermied tiger given to him by a friend sits proudly by a vintage Brazilian coffee table next to needlepoint tapestries by Alexander Calder. If someone has any better ideas, Louboutin is open to them. "My trainer from Paris was spending his holiday nearby and came to have lunch. He looked at the living room chandelier and said, ‘It doesn’t make sense to have it here; you’ll hit your head.’ " And so it was moved several feet back, requiring less-than-pristine housing for the wires. "Design by democracy might not always work," Louboutin says, "but it’s important to listen."
A massive deck joins three of the structures, making Louboutin’s bedroom easily accessible from the living room and kitchen. Social life at the compound revolves around this outdoor space, where a long table seats 10 on rush-wrapped chairs, midcentury designs attributed to T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings. "You remember the Marilyn Monroe movie How to Marry a Millionaire? They have that table and those exact chairs in the kitchen," says Louboutin. His cook reigns over the outdoor grill, preparing local fish such as whole dorade. Wide steps lead down the hill from the deck, creating bleachers whose sole purpose is to make it possible to observe the changing colors of nature.
With the architect Tarek Shamma, who designed Louboutin’s Madrid and Luxembourg boutiques, he is also adding a fifth structure, called La Folly, a few hundred yards from the existing compound, on a separate plot of land nearer to the main road. In the steel-rod-and-cement-block phase now, it will become a 1,500-square-foot observation deck inspired by the stepwells of Jaipur, India. In the center of the structure will be a fire pit, with views visible through a series of small windows above. "What’s nice about this spot is it’s very close to the water," says Shamma, "so all the rice fields become a lagoon in the winter. Christian didn’t want another house, but he didn’t want to miss this opportunity. He runs here every morning and walks in the afternoon, so he had the idea to do something where he could stop and just be."
TO HEAR LOUBOUTIN speak about his life, it has been a series of picaresque adventures. Growing up in the 12th arrondissement of Paris the son of a cabinetmaker and a housewife, he was bright and capable but expelled from school after school. Other students called him le métis, or "mixed race," which caused him to wonder if he was secretly adopted. (Three years ago he discovered he was the product of an affair his mother had with an Egyptian man.) Louboutin was allowed to come and go when he pleased, and before he was old enough to drive, he was living part time with an older man. His closest school friend, Eva Ionesco, now an actress and filmmaker, was the subject of a national scandal due to provocative photographs taken by her artist mother when she was a young girl. "Louis Malle’s poster for Pretty Baby was a copy of her photograph. They called her Baby Porno. She was so sweet that I had to protect her," he says. (Ionesco, now married to the novelist Simon Liberati, is lounging poolside, shaded by a pergola imported from Rajasthan.) With Ionesco, Louboutin became an adolescent fixture at the glamorously dissolute nightclub Le Palace, which resembled New York’s Studio 54 in its high-low mix of socialites, punk urchins, famous designers and rock stars, and in the enthusiastic consumption of substances of all kinds. A nomad at heart, Louboutin would periodically run off to Egypt or India. "My favorite game as a kid was to play travel agent in my bedroom," he says. "OK, so I’m traveling for three months. I want to start in the Middle East and then go to India. I’m going to take this plane, arriving at six o’clock. By the time I’m out of the airport, at nine o’clock, I’ll be in the hotel." In his childhood fantasy he sent money ahead to each destination. Today he is accompanied everywhere by his butler.
At 16, Louboutin got his first real job working backstage as a gofer at Paris’s Folies Bergère, where his notebooks full of the outrageous shoes he had been sketching since he was a schoolboy failed to find any takers. Looking at his dramatic designs today, with their crystal-studded stilettos, exposed-toe cleavage, vertiginously high heels and exotic motifs, it’s easy to trace their aesthetic roots back to that immersion in the burlesque. Their spirit, too: Louboutin’s shoes have always been bold and sexy, mischievous and joyful, the optimistic product of someone who went looking for himself and liked what he found. With no formal training, Louboutin used those same sketches to help land a job as a design assistant at the French shoe company Charles Jourdan. He went on to freelance for shoe designer Maud Frizon and Chanel, but when a temporary job for his idol Roger Vivier ended, Louboutin believed he had experienced the best he ever would and decided to leave the business. He pursued his other passion, gardening, and started working as a landscaper.
Then, one afternoon, when he was looking at a lamp he wanted to acquire from his friend, the dealer Eric Philippe, now a prominent purveyor of midcentury design, Philippe pointed out an empty shop across the way in the arcade Galerie Véro-Dodat in the first arrondissement. "He said, ‘Why don’t you do your own shoes? You just take a store.’ " Two days later, over dinner with his old friend Henri Seydoux and Chambelland, then his romantic partner, Louboutin brought up the idea, and Chambelland jumped on it, helping to fund it with Seydoux. The timing might have seemed fraught—it was 1992, and the global mood was bleak—but Louboutin was unfazed. "Most people would say it was crazy to start a business then," he says, "but I don’t think there is a correct moment anyway."
Chambelland, who ran the business side, knew to keep the worst details away from Louboutin, especially during the first few years, when "the money was bleeding," he says. Luckily, American shoppers soon took interest after a fashion journalist spotted Princess Caroline of Monaco at the store. Soon, Chambelland and Louboutin could open wholesale accounts overseas as well as more of their own stores, expanding to New York, Los Angeles, London, Moscow and Hong Kong. Louboutin didn’t advertise then and still doesn’t. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent cratering of the U.S. luxury market, it was his geographic diversity—Asia and Europe were strong markets even if America wasn’t—and the rising importance of celebrities that helped him stay afloat. Those red soles were always so easy to spot in paparazzi pictures: Cameron Diaz, Oprah Winfrey and Rihanna brought attention to the brand just by being seen in Louboutin’s wares.
By 2007, the company’s growth was starting to outpace Louboutin’s bandwidth, forcing him to make too many business decisions. "I started to become nervous and irritable. I had changed—I couldn’t concentrate anymore." Knowing they needed help, Chambelland and Louboutin found Alexis Mourot, who had worked for Marc Jacobs. After an almost four-hour interview, Mourot came on as chief operating officer and general manager, and the business has grown 14-fold since. Says Mourot, "It’s about, Christian has a feeling or an idea, and how do we work to make sure it’s well-managed operationally?"
With Mourot onboard, strategic expansion became possible, though Louboutin continues to work on instinct. He launched handbags in 2003. Men’s shoes, launched in 2010, came about only because Louboutin’s friend, the singer Mika, wanted him to make him something he could wear on tour. Today they account for 22 percent of sales. Nail polish came next, mostly because Louboutin wanted something to complement open-toe models in his marketing lookbooks. But it also made sense, given that Louboutin’s famous red sole was first created, in 1993, by painting the bottom of a shoe with red nail polish. In 2012, Louboutin formed a joint venture with the private-label company Batallure Beauty. Today there are 31 colors of nail polish, ranging from sea-foam green to dark gray to, of course, Louboutin Rouge, and 45 hues of lipsticks.
Over the years, companies have come to him proposing licenses, including for eyewear and fashion lines; he has refused them all. "Legitimacy is a big thing for me," he says, "and I want to work on the product. My goal is to do something I’m proud of. As long as you drive something to the end and do it your way, you’ll always be proud. If it’s successful, even better." Take, for example, his packaging for his cosmetics: If the efficient packing of shipping crates makes a difference to the bottom line, then what to do with the oversize spikes on Louboutin’s nail polishes, and lipstick tubes with pointed bottoms? Some are covered in scales, making them look like sea creatures topped with jeweled crowns. Instead of coming in classic boxes, they are nestled into cushioned jewelry-style cases. "We don’t make a huge margin," Louboutin says. "So if we need to raise the price, we raise the price." Sephora stocks both lip and nail lines—with products selling for $90 and $50, respectively. As of this month, 60 of Louboutin’s own boutiques will sell the perfume (for $275) and nail polish lines.
Perfume, that great engine of profit, was the next logical step. Still, Mourot says this new perfume will be available in fewer than 200 points of sale worldwide, because "we don’t want to lose control of our distribution." To create the scent, they put out briefs to 30 perfumers, and Louboutin ultimately winnowed down the 120 samples (an unusually large number to choose from) to three. The results are as maximalist as everything else Louboutin has done. The hyperfeminine scents explode out of colorful glass bottles designed by Thomas Heatherwick.
"I thought the bottle should be designed by an architect," Louboutin says. The late Oscar Niemeyer, whose drawings decorate Louboutin’s Melides bedroom, was his first choice to design packaging for the lipsticks and the perfume. "I went to see him about the project, and he was so sweet. He was already 100 years old. ‘I’m completely busy,’ he said. ‘But I would love to do it if you can wait.’ I told him, ‘Of course I’ll wait,’ and then he died."
Heatherwick’s connection to the project was casual at first. The two chatted during a series of friendly encounters that began in London and continued during social visits with mutual friends in Umbria, Italy, and appointments in New York whenever their travel plans overlapped. "I had never worked on designing a bottle, and didn’t expect to, and wasn’t even sure if I was interested at first, but I enjoyed bouncing ideas around with Christian," Heatherwick says. "We were exploring everything: what color the liquid should be, if it should be a liquid at all, how you apply things to your body and the relationship of body and fragrance. Finally he asked if I’d consider designing the bottle." The result resembles "a pastry where they put a slit in the middle and twist it inside out on itself," says Heatherwick. "The idea evolved from making a simple rectilinear bottle and turning it inside out so it still has a square top and bottom—something that played with both geometry and softness."
It’s no surprise that Louboutin’s scents are big. "I’m a believer in the strength of people in general," he says, "and beauty is a way for women to decide how they want to express themselves." Unlike some designers, who have an official house muse on the payroll, Louboutin has an ad hoc arrangement with a group of women who help inspire him. He counts among them Ionesco and Elisa Sednaoui, his goddaughter, who poses in the marketing visuals for the perfume, as well as fashion fixture Farida Khelfa and Léa Seydoux, who is a daughter of his co-founder. "It’s not about their looks," Louboutin says, as Ionesco emerges from the pool in a picture hat and a one-piece black bandeau, her dark-gray eye shadow smudged languorously. "It’s definitely about their attitude. People who are around me, that I know, are survivors. They’re in charge of their own destiny, of themselves."
